TheRadicalModerate

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@145 Tom M: Yes, I agree that ad-monetized eyeballs are not the only thing of value on the internet. People are minting real power out there, too. Cf. Trump, Donald J. You guys may have already seen this, but I'd...

The never-ending Quest For Eyeballs may be part of the problem, but I don't think it's the big one. The big one is that the round-trip times on the news/information cycle have dropped from days/weeks down to hours. You can't...

"Their definition of it is that everyone has access to everyone's thoughts and memories." This'll never work. "Access" drops you into the qualia problem almost instantly. Humans don't have well-normalized thoughts. My activation pattern for "I could really go for...

Aren't we a group mind already? Doesn't our civilization exhibit emergent behavior that can't be attributed to individuals? Isn't there dispersed knowledge that isn't atomic to the individual? Why would we expect the components of a group mind to behave...

"2007 is when the human species accidentally invented telepathy (via the fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media with always-connected handheld internet devices). This gets an early nomination for most thought provoking sentence of 2016. Unfortunately, ever since...

"What we need is enough coastal desalination plants to relieve pressure on the Syrian water supply, combined with resettlement camps for refugees fleeing the war..." Since we're starting from reality now as opposed to, say, reality ten years ago, need...

The idea isn't that one way of training is necessarily better than another; it's that lots of ways are better than a few ways. The more overconstrained your social system is, the less diversity of action you get, which is...

Well, that was thoroughly depressing. Perhaps the Chinese (and everybody else) should think about freedom from a neuro-psychological standpoint for a while. Human brains are a finite resource; they can only learn so much behavior. Even worse, if you subscribe...

Cameron had better be willing to ban transmissions of binary data as well, because it's trivially easy to obfuscate a key exchange in anything but text. (It's actually pretty easy in text, too.) After that, one hunk of binary data...

"...but HST interception is more like ABM territory than 747 interception..." Agreed, but my point is that you have to have that kind of air defense anyway, because lack of such a defense leaves you vulnerable to genuine military hypersonic...

I'm gonna push back on the security issue a bit. It's real, but it's not going to be something that represents any more threat than will be out there at the time of deployment. HSTs don't fly routes; they fly...

I agree we need mincome in some form, but there are a couple of caveats. First, mincome is an uncontrolled system. If you're living in a genuinely abundant society, it's no problem if you wind up with the employable leaving...

Do you think that Hillary's "blue wall" crumbled in part because of an out-migration of Democrat-leaning voters from those states to other states where their votes wouldn't affect the Electoral College outcome, rather than because they voted Trump this time in defiance of globalization?...

To avoid crippling fees, you need to maintain a certain minimum balance. When I arrived in Australia about 2000 that was the case. But there was a wave of change and these days fee-free accounts are the norm. To the point where I have accounts with three different banks purely because that's easier than grinding through the process to close the accounts. There's no need for those fees any more, at least with the more internet-enabled banks. An accurate fee would be a few cents a year which would mostly over the reporting costs (in other words the exact cost...

One thing in Australia is that post offices are often agencies now, a corner of the chemist or part of the newsagency. But they all offer a whole heap of services, to the point where it's common for staff to look up the thing on their computer and say "right, I print this form, you fill it out, I stamp it then scan it into the computer, you pay $10.25, and I give you a receipt". They literally have never seen that form before in 99% of cases. We have had to do this several times to get a mortgage...